How Do I Stop WP From "Clicking" Every Link When I Post?

I've tried everything I can think of to no avail, so I'm asking here. Here's the problem:

I'm making some blogs with affiliate datafeeds. Every time I put up a feed, it automatically generates thousands of clicks to my links. Tracking it down, it turns out that it clicks every link in every post. So with 2 links per post and a 5k item feed, that's 10k clicks that blast into the network in the timespan of about 2 hours.

Since it's a CJ datafeed, this means that these clicks kill my EPC (and the EPC of any merchant not big enough to absorb this "activity" dies too). This gets merchants upset for no good reason and I don't want to attract negative attention. There's nothing fishy on the blogs...no "Counter Strike" or the like. But it sure looks like it when suddenly a new site gets 10k clicks in a night! Obviously I don't want to get falsely accused.

So as you can guess, I want to make it so WordPress doesn't auto-click my links when I put new posts up or update 'em.

I've tried setting it to not automatically pingback/trackback, but it does it anyway. Messing with the comment.php, which looks like it should have the relevant code, has done nothing either.

So I'm hoping someone here knows how to make WordPress quit doing that! Thanks!

Nobody knows the answer?

It's a plugin problem. Since we don't know which one you're using to track your feeds, best thing is to switch it.

Nope, it can't be coming from a plugin. It happens even if I manually post, with no plugins installed at all (although in that case, it's just a few faux-clicks since if I do it manually, it's not a bulk thing). So that can't be it.

I also don't have any tracking plugins on, since the regular AWStats for the account gives me the search terms and page views, etc. I usually just use CJ's stats to tell me when things are indexed, but all these extra clicks screw that up.

I found the answer to this infernal problem, which had been bugging me for weeks before I made this thread.

As I suspected, it has absolutely nothing to do with any plugin. A clean install with no plugins confirmed what logic had already told me.

It actually stems from a little-talked-about file that is responsible for checking to see if in-post links lead to blogs. To check, it sends a request to see what headers are returned by those URLs.

Each request it makes = a click. Neutering the file eliminated the problem.

I suspect all outgoing pingback/trackback functionality is now dead too, but oh well.

I was about to create some datafeed stores on unused domains and would like to know what the file is.

Does anyone know what the file is that will prevent each link from being "clicked"?

BTW- I already lost one CJ account because of something similar, turns out the merchants complain if you post 10,000 weight loss articles each with 1-2 affiliate links across a wordwide blog network and forget to cloak the link... boo...

seems like a plug-in prob, look over your site and see the error

By clearing out that standard WordPress file, I stopped it from doing the clicks that were happening even when no plugins were active (or even installed, in one case!).

However, there *are* indeed some plugins that are generating clicks, too.

Once I got all my usual plugins back on, I found that one of them does cause clicks. But there are still not nearly as many autoclicks as there used to be. I'd say that together there used to be about 4 clicks/link and now there's "just" one. Still a lot when there's a big feed involved, so later on I'll probably go fishing again to see what that last source is.

BTW- I already lost one CJ account because of something similar, turns out the merchants complain if you post 10,000 weight loss articles each with 1-2 affiliate links across a wordwide blog network and forget to cloak the link... boo...

Click to expand...

Sounds like there may be more to that than the amount of pings...